Success and setbacks!
The Marine Protected Area survey is run by team member Chris, it consists of 20, 40, 60 and 100 meter line transects. The pier on Santa Rosa is the dividing line where the Carrington Point MPA starts, which makes it the perfect place to deploy the ROV. We have the tether marked with distance, and floats. The 100 meter transects require our inflatable boat because the length of the tether will not permit it.
The MPA transects have been going very well, we have been seeing tons of fish! The visibility has been the best that we’ve seen it.
and had a curious new friend come up and gave the ROV a friendly bump!
After our hike around the island, we went to get the boat inflated so we could start doing the longer distance MPA transects, only to find out that it had been damaged in transit and had a few holes! We sent out an email immediately to other researchers that were heading to the island and they pick up a patch kit for us thankfully!
Later worked on one of our new units, Leviathan, which has the Blue Robotics T100 thrusters. We had to add some buoyancy to make it neutrally buoyant. It had a great first dive.
It still needs some more balancing, when heading full forward it dives, we found that the front is a bit too buoyant still and we were able to do water breaches!
